Positive growth across stalwart markets and emerging countries helped offset negative trends in the consolidated Russia, CIS and Eastern European region, which saw a 22.5% decline in travellers, as well as the Australasia region, which dropped 6.3% year on year. Africa remained flat compared to last year, offsetting a weak Nigerian market due to commodity declines and currency restrictions, with growth in Sub-Saharan markets following successful road shows and trade network development in developing markets such as Kenya and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Almarri explained: “Building on our core multi-source visitation strategy, we have been able to prudently balance our risk exposure to specific geographies, shift our investment to frontier growth markets for Dubai, and be much more targeted on penetrating niche segments within our stronghold markets. Additionally, we have been very focused on ensuring a committed presence in markets with high levels of disposable income, such as China, and those with future potential like Nigeria or Indonesia that have a growing tourism base to tap into.
“Through 2016 we will continue to leverage increasing airlift, open and streamlined visa policies, and a broad destination appeal that offers something for all travel segments. Further afield, in markets across Australasia and the Americas where we offer convenient direct flight access, we have been working very closely with airline partners, the travel trade, and the hotel sector to create compelling transit programmes.
“Of course, markets such as the GCC, India, UK and Germany, which are our traditional strongholds and continue to deliver over a third of our tourism traffic, will always be a critical priority as there is already a proven credibility of the Dubai destination offering. Our aim here is to build advocacy, create more reasons to revisit, and deliver even greater value for repeat travellers. Hence our investments are based on better analytics to understand our core segments from these countries, becoming very customised in communicating propositions that are relevant for them, encouraging longer stays and ultimately generating greater economic value per tourist through 2016 and beyond.”
Having rolled out its global brand campaign in the last quarter of 2015, Dubai continues to work on building brand awareness in new markets and addressing perception gaps in existing markets where there is limited market share capture, to better penetrate and attract the fast growing, mass affluent segments as future leisure and business visitors.
Dubai’s tourism performance in 2015 is also reflective of its ability to respond swiftly to changing market dynamics, leveraging the strength of its unified public-private sector partnership-led approach. 2015 saw significant investment in sustaining the competitiveness of the emirate’s supply-side proposition, with increasing airlift across key feeder markets, a more balanced growth in hotel inventory, and improvements in retail competitiveness, in addition to enhancements across the core destination product offerings.
